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Translation

The Creation
Translated

Before the sea and land and heaven which covers all, there was one appearance of nature in the whole orb which they called chaos: the wild and jumbled mass, not anything except an inert and crowded weight, and the seeds of not similar things were joined in this discord. No Titan thus far had exposed the light of the universe, nor was Phobe replenishing the horns by growing, nor was the earth enveloped by surrounding sky balanced on its own weight, nor had Amphitrite stretched her long arms to the edge of the earth; and as that over there was earth and sea and air, the earth was therefore unstable, water that can not be swum, air in need of light; nothing was remaining in its own form, each was opposing the other, because the object was one, cold was fighting hot, wet and dry, soft with hard, without weight, with weight.

The god, better than nature, broke up this quarreling. For he tore apart the sky from the earth, the waters from the ground, and separated the clear air from the dense. After he unfurled these things and lifted them away from the gloomy heap, he united them into separate, like-minded groups:

-break-

Scarcely everything that separated had certain boundaries, with the dark blob having been firmly planted for a long time, the whole sky became excited with stars; and not any of the regions themselves from the orb existed without life, the stars alone in the sky held the beauty of the gods, having made way for the waves inhabited by shiny fish, the earth was inhabited by wild animals, the moving air, birds.

A more sacred animal than these, able of higher mind which could rule over the others was not there. Produced is man, whether it was from this divine seed or that producer of things, the origin of a better world, or the recently made earth, cut from the high heaven, retained the seed of the sky. Which the son of Iapetus, mixed with water from a river, created after the image of the all-powerful gods, and while other animals walked looking at the ground, he gave humans an upwards looking tendency, and ordered him to look up, and raise his face to the sky. Thus the rough earth, having only just been made and without image, took on the unknown figures of men.

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